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All Rise...

Appellate Judge Tom Becker ordered up some Deadly Campus Corpse, but he sent it back...it just didn't taste right.

The Charge

Are ya dead yet?

The Case

Lindsay (Mary Wilcox, SCTV) is
a lovely young lady with troubles. For one, she's frigid. This dovetails nicely
with her other trouble: she's a necrophiliac. The colder they are, the hotter
she gets. It all has something to do with unresolved daddy issues…I mean,
doesn't it always?

Thanks to her frequent and overly affectionate appearances at the funerals
of handsome young men—evidently, in this town, being under 40 and
attractive is the kiss of death—Lindsay is invited by a mortician (Timothy
Scott, Blue Sky) to an elite club of other dead lovers.

Then Lindsay meets a very handsome—and very alive—man, Alex
(Lyle Waggoner, The Carol Burnett
Show), who marries her; trouble is, that whole having-a-pulse thing gets in
the way of their sex life, and they end up living as brother and sister.

Will Lindsay be able to summon the strength to love a man who still has red
blood—rather than embalming fluid—flowing through his veins? Or will
the siren song of funereal orgies prove too strong to drown out her desires to
Love Me Deadly?

Next, we're back in college with track star Craig Lewis (Jeff East, Superman: The Movie). At this
campus, fraternity pledging is all the rage, and no house rages harder than the
Delts. Not only are they hard party boys, they're also influential: One former
member who is now a computer programmer at the college is able to get Craig and
affable fellow pledge Barney (Charlie Martin Smith, American Graffiti) all the classes
they want, a luxury usually not afforded freshman.

Barney and Craig are given a tough initiation: they have to strip to their
jockstraps on a freezing cold day and run several miles through the woods.
Unfortunately, Barney falls and breaks his leg, so Craig continues on his own to
get help. But when he and his new frat bros return, they find Barney dead.
Instead of going to the police, as Craig wants, the brothers insist on hiding
the body in the freezer then taking it to a ski slope the following week to make
it look like an accident. The other Delts seem OK with this, but Craig looks
like he's going to lose his mind. Will dealing with The Curious Case of the
Campus Corpse drive him over the edge?

Campus Corpse—the onscreen title, not to be confused with the
film's other a.k.a. The Hazing—is an odd duck of a film. It's like
a short story by a high school sophomore that's really, really good, provided
you keep telling yourself that it was written by a high school sophomore. It
takes a kind of interesting premise and then drags it out interminably. It's not
a horror movie at all, and despite scenes of campus high jinks, it's not really
a comedy. It's well-acted and well-made for its budget, but it's really a
forgettable curiosity.

Love Me Deadly, on the other hand, is not so easily forgotten, in the
way that a mouthful of year-old cottage cheese isn't easily forgotten. Like
Campus Corpse, this is a mighty confused bit of celluloid, but the
confusion here seems to be about just how sick a film these folks wanted to
make. There are endless musical montage scenes (usually scored with the film's
loungey/romantic theme) of Lindsay and Alex frolicking, and plenty of flashbacks
to Lindsay's childhood with her daddy.

But then, we get some really nasty stuff, the nastiest being a scene in
which the mortician picks up a male prostitute (played by briefly ubiquitous
hard- and softcore star I. William Quinn, Poor Cecily), takes him back to
the funeral home, gets him naked, and…well, I don't want to spoil it.
Let's just say that it's as hearty a combination of sleaze and horror as I've
seen in a while. There are killings and corpse orgies—shot in, like,
psychedelic vision, man!—and Lyle Waggoner, looking like he wandered onto
what he thought was a Carol Burnett movie spoof, only to discover, to his
horror…

The question is, why are these two films sharing a disc? Other than the low
budget and the appearance of an errant corpse, The Curious Case of the Campus
Corpse has nothing whatsoever to do with the sleazy, exploitative Love Me
Deadly. It would be like pairing Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer with Regarding Henry because they both feature
characters named Henry.

Newly minted B-movie maven Maria Kanellis brings us this entertaining if
awkward edition through her "Maria's B-Movie Mayhem" line courtesy of Code Red.
Love Me Deadly looks pretty good, Campus Corpsea bit rougher, with
a lot print damage and some streaking. For supplements, there's a gallery for
Love Me Deadly that includes promo shots as well as pictures of DVD cases
from the film's other releases. Campus Corpse gets a very nice supplement
ported from an earlier release: a retrospective featuring cast members and the
director, though a commentary from the earlier release is absent. We also get
(once again) Maria's music video for her song "Fantasy," evidently a staple of
the series.

The Verdict

Yeah, the movies are pretty guilty, but Maria's starting to grow on me.

Give us your feedback!

Did we give Maria's B-Movie Mayhem: Love Me Deadly / The Curious Case Of The Campus Corpse a fair trial? yes / no

What's "fair"? Whether positive or negative, our reviews should be unbiased, informative, and critique the material on its own merits.